“We should talk about that, too,” she whispered.

“We will. We’ll figure out where we go from here.”

She chewed on her lip. “What if we aren’t going anywhere?”

I stared at her, but didn’t say a word.

She began to squirm. “It doesn’t have to mean anything besides the fact that we were both horny and drunk. What’s wrong with a good meaningless fuck once in a while?”

“A meaningless fuck?”

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, you aren’t bullshitting me with that line. It wasn’t meaningless.”

I waited. She fidgeted, then cleared her throat and said, “You know that old saying, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?”

I lifted my finger and traced it along her jaw, down the soft skin of her neck where the darkening bite marks I’d left were still showing. I studied them. There were more than half a dozen of them. Some of them very dark. I remembered how it had felt, sinking my teeth into her pliant, giving flesh, hearing her whimper of pain. The taste of her. I was hard in an instant, leaning in to get a whiff of her scent.

She shuddered when my lips touched her ear, but she didn’t pull away.

“I don’t think what happened between us can stay in Vegas. Do you?”

My lips retraced every mark I’d put on her. I wanted to make more. I wanted to cover her with my mark of ownership. It was a primal, caveman sort of feeling. I didn’t own Emilia, of course, but that possessive, ferocious need to be with her, to keep her safe, was a palpable force. I needed to mark my territory.

“Adam,” she pressed her hand against my chest. “Don’t start this here.”

I moved my mouth up to her ear. “When we get back—come home with me.”

She hesitated. “I don’t—”

I tried to force the frustration from every muscle that tensed inside of me. She was acting like she was a scared deer and I was a hungry wolf. Maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth. “Just for the day, then.”

She looked at me for a long time and quietly nodded. I whipped out my tablet, opening up the latest app. We spent the rest of the bus ride playing Angry Birds Star Wars.

Chapter Seventeen

When the bus dropped us off at the complex, I made sure to grab her bag and stuff it in my trunk before she could change her mind about going with me. Heath had attended the Con as a player and had ridden back on the player-sponsored bus. Rumor had it that our game friend Katya had made it down from Canada to attend, too, and Heath had spent his time with her. I wasn’t ready to give up the secret to anyone besides Heath and Emilia that FallenOne was actually the CEO of Draco, so despite the fact that I would have liked to have met her in person, I kept my distance.

Now Emilia was talking to Heath at his Jeep and I leaned up against my car door watching them from behind my sunglasses. I could hear the tension in Heath’s tone as he fought to keep his voice from rising. I wondered what they could be arguing about.

“Whoa, nice car!” said Blondie the intern, who, it appeared, had snuck up on me. I never did get her name and I wasn’t much interested, either. I kept my eyes on Heath and Emilia to make sure she didn’t just hop in his car with him and take off without her stuff. She seemed to want to, but Heath was telling her to go with me. Attaboy.

“Thanks,” I muttered. Now go away.

“Think I could—maybe—get a ride sometime?”

I glanced at her from behind my sunglasses. She had a hand on her hip, her back arched so that her chest poked out. I let myself look. They were nice tits, after all. I opened my mouth to answer her when I heard the Jeep’s door slam. Emilia was storming toward me and Heath sat behind the wheel of his car, shaking his head and watching her with a stern look on his face.

Well, this was going to be awkward.

“Umm. I gotta go,” I said to the blonde, hoping she’d take the hint and walk off. She didn’t. Emilia came up to the car, tossed the intern a glance out of the corner of her eyes and then turned to me.

“I need my bag. Where did you put it?”

The blonde’s eyebrows shot up and she gave Emilia the once-over. These two had to work together fairly regularly, so I didn’t want to make this awkward for Emilia. “I heard you need a ride home,” I said. Then I turned to the blonde. “Excuse us. I only have room for one passenger.”

The woman’s jaw dropped and I clamped my hand around Emilia’s elbow, making it appear as casual as I could as I guided her toward the passenger seat. Blondie folded her arms across her chest, spun and stalked off. “Great, now Cari’s pissed at me,” Emilia muttered as she got in the seat.